Жанр «экологические дебаты»

Collectif Argos: Climate Refugees

Appearing in the reliable "Routledge Research in Education" book series, this overlooked collection comprises twelve commissioned essays on how to educate with regards to climate change, not only in schools, but at every level and for all ages, as some contributors do promote "lifelong integrated education", adult education, and various forms of activism (see p. 66 and 162).Topics are diverse and broad, always relevant, often interdisciplinary in focus, borrowing either from peace learning (Chapter 3), antiracist education (Chapter 5), interfaith education (Chapter 10), religion (Chapter 9), and even art and culture (Chapter 10).In his foreword, Archbishop Desmond Tutu recognizes that a significant part of the climate change problem is actually due to "more or less ignoring the ethics of the human condition" and praises, as other contributors do, an "emphasis on climate change as a global social justice issue" (p.xvi).Incidentally, this theme of environmental justice is present in many essays (see p. 150).

This chapter investigates the argumentative function of quoted metaphors in political debates about climate change. The metaphorical depiction of political arguments promotes a particular viewpoint on the environmental crisis (e.g. climate change perceived as the enemy of humanity). Yet this metaphorical depiction provides enough ground for political opponents to highlight the inaccuracy of the figurative mapping (e.g. humanity as the enemy of the planet and climate change as a weapon). How are metaphor source domains exploited, and how is this exploitation questioned and criticised by political opponents? To address these questions, this chapter focuses on metaphorical occurrences related to the scenario the earth as a building on fire. This scenario can be observed in a plurality of texts produced by various political leaders and by different climate change activists, analysing a wide range of arguments promoted by these multiple uses of the scenario in the texts. This chapter draws on Critical Metaphor Analysis and metaphor scenarios to show how environmental debates may revolve around the political use and mis-use of a metaphor.

Climate scientists agree that a) human activity is a significant driver of recent climate change, and b) climate change is a danger to humanity. However, the general public accepts the former point, but rejects the latter. Thus, climate experts and the general public diverge in their understanding of the relationship between humans and climate change. My dissertation examines the role of intuitive patterns of thinking in public perceptions of climate change. Of specific interest is construal-based thinking: intuitive frameworks that are generally useful in the context of everyday reasoning, but can engender systematic misconceptions in other scientific domains (e.g., biology). Results revealed that one such construal-anthropic thinking-is recruited when thinking about climate change and impacts global climate change understanding and engagement. Anthropic thinking is a set of intuitive frameworks that are united in their distortion of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Among these frameworks are exceptionalist thinking (i.e., thinking that humans are exceptional to, and unique from other species) and anthropomorphic thinking (i.e., the attribution of human properties to non-human organisms). I conducted four studies to examine whether undergraduates recruit anthropic thinking in the context of global climate change, and the consequences of reliance on such patterns of thinking. Study One examined construal-based thinking about global climate change using an in-lab battery designed for this purpose. I modified sets of pre-existing measures of construal-based thinking to inquire about climate change. Of the investigated construals, participants only consistently engaged in exceptionalist thinking about climate change which tended to involve the correct belief that humans are uniquely contributing to climate change and the incorrect belief that humans are uniquely impervious to the effects of climate change. Moreover, participants performed similarly on measures of exceptionalist thinking about climate change and biology-a domain that is understood to be susceptible to such patterns of thinking. Study Two tested whether individuals spontaneously engage in construal-based thinking about climate change by investigating patterns of language used during semi-structured interviews about climate change. Of the investigated construals, participants most commonly used anthropic patterns of language to describe climate change. Anthropomorphic language was particularly common, revealing that individuals attributed human qualities (e.g., emotions, goals) to non-human organisms (e.g., the Earth, plants and animals) when discussing climate change. Interestingly, the use of such language during these interviews predicted increased understanding of climate change, suggesting that use of anthropomorphic analogies might aid understandings. Further, participants used exceptionalist language when describing both causes and effects of climate change, corroborating findings from the first study. Study Three investigated the predictive role of anthropic thinking in understanding and concern surrounding global climate change. Using a time-pressured manipulation, I encouraged individuals to either respond quickly (preventing them from using more deliberate reasoning strategies) or slowly (allowing deliberate strategies) to a set of true/false questions about climate change. Surprisingly, exceptionalist and anthropomorphic thinking only predicted climate change understanding in the time delay condition, suggesting that anthropic thinking is not readily available to influence knowledge when individuals must make responses quickly, but rather, may represent a more deliberative reasoning heuristic. Furthermore, anthropomorphic thinking was positively associated with concern about global climate change across conditions. Combined with findings from Study Two, these demonstrate that anthropic thinking could have a role in both aiding and hindering understanding and engagement with climate change. Finally, Study Four investigated whether exceptionalist thinking about climate change could be reduced by increasing the salience of conceptual connections between humans and global climate change. To do so, I used a concept-mapping task wherein individuals drew connections between human-related concepts (e.g., burning fossil fuels) and global climate change. Participants who completed concepts maps at the beginning of the battery showed decreased exceptionalist thinking about climate change causes and effects compared to those who completed concept maps at the end of the battery, suggesting that exceptionalist thinking about climate change may rest on decreased salience that humans both a) play a role in causing climate change and b) will be affected by climate change. Exceptionalist thinking also predicted decreased attribution of damage due to recent environmental disasters (e.g., hurricanes Florence and Michael) to global climate change. This demonstrates a way in which exceptionalist thinking might act as a cognitive barrier to understanding how climate change can impact humans. This body of research extends previous investigations of intuitive thinking and scientific understandings to a novel and timely domain: global climate change. Notably, these findings demonstrate that people recruit exceptionalism and anthropomorphism when thinking about climate change, and that these patterns of thinking influence their understanding and engagement with the issue. I discuss the implications of these results for education, and their potential utility in the development of interventions to improve public perceptions of climate change as well as science more broadly.

Global climate change and contaminants, a call to arms not yet heard?

Water sprays from an open fire hydrant in Brooklyn, New York, in the midst of a July 2010 heat wave that affected much of the eastern United States.In 2007 the New York City Department of Environmental Protection first teamed up with Alianza Dominicana, a Washington Heights community organization, to educate city residents about the appropriate use of fire hydrants and other ways

The issue of environmental problems is particularly important today. The relevance is determined by the fact that global challenges arise every day, and global warming causes serious climate change and threatens the disappearance of the ecosystem. The purpose of the article is to analyze current trends and consequences of global and regional climate change. Methodology. A set of general scientific methods (analytical and synthetic hermeneutic, pragmatic, and generalization techniques) was employed to achieve the research goal and ensure the scientific reliability of the results. Scientific novelty. The study reveals the main problems of nature management and changes in nature caused by anthropogenic activities. The importance of the population's counteraction to negative impacts on the planet’s ecosystem is emphasized. The study examines the main causes of climate change and substantiates the global risks associated with this phenomenon. The impact of climate change on the economic sector is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the terms “climate crisis” and “global climate change”. It is found that modern environmental problems include an increase in the number of wars, ocean pollution, global warming, resource shortages, and others. Each of these problems poses a serious threat to the development of any state. It is proved that in the context of political instability, Ukraine does not have the full potential to implement scientifically based balanced measures. The absence of an effective state policy on sustainable environmental management poses a threat to the economy and environment of Ukraine. It is necessary to find ways to solve the identified problems and consider promising areas for improving the factors that affect the environment and the environmental situation in general. Improving the environmental situation will allow Ukraine to rise to a new level in the global ranking. The conclusions state that climate change threatens not only the economic and environmental security of the state, but also national security in general.

This study uses an integrative approach to study the water-quality impacts of future global climate and land-use changes. In this study, changing land-use types was used as a mitigation strategy to reduce the adverse impacts of global climate change on water resources. The climate scenarios were based on projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Kingdom Hadley Centre’s climate model (HadCM2). The Thornthwaite waterbalance model was coupled with a land-use model (LTHIA) to investigate the hydrologic effects of future climate and land-use changes in the Ohio River Basin. The land-use model is based on the Soil Conservation Service’s curve-number method. It uses the curve number, an index of land use and soil type, to calculate runoff volume and depth. The Arc View programming language, A venue, was used to integrate the two models into a geographic information system (GIS). An output of the water-balance model, daily precipitation values adjusted for potential evapotranspiration, served as one of the inputs into the land-use model. Two watersheds were used in the present study: one containing the city of Cincinnati on the main stem of the Ohio River, and one containing the city of Columbus on a tributary of the Ohio River. These cities represent two major metropolitan areas in the Ohio River Basin with different land uses experiencing different rates of population growth. The projected hypothetical land-use changes were based on linear extrapolations of current population data. Results of the analyses indicate that conversion from agricultural land use to low-density residential land use may decrease the amount of surface runoff. The land-use practices which generate the least amo.unt of runoff are forest, low-density residential, and agriculture; whereas high-density residential and commercial land-use types produce the highest runoff. The hydrologic soil type present was also an important factor in determining the amount of runoff and non-point-source pollution. A runoff-depth matrix and total nitrogen matrix were created for Cincinnati and Columbus to describe possible land-use mitigation measures in response to global climate change. The differences in Cincinnati and Cohunbus were due to differences in geographic location, air temperature, and total runoff. The results of this study may be useful to planners and policy makers for defining the possible impacts of future global climate and land-use changes on water resources.

The ideas proposed here present new concepts and paradigms for environmental scientists, ecologists, and nature conservationists. Indeed, in a political and cultural context where it seems that much of the ‘environmental debate’ has been distilled down to climate change and climate change to anthropogenic carbon dioxide, this approach places new emphasis on the need to understand natural processes better.

Climate change illustrates the entanglement of “society” and “nature”, and the problems associated with this binary division. For humans, climate change plays out on a social arena. In light of climate change, pre-existing power structures based on categorizations such as gender, class and ethnicity may be reinforced or challenged. I argue that intersectionality, developed within feminist theory, is a useful tool for analyzing the power dynamics of climate change. Feminist research on climate change is still small, and an intersectional perspective has not been applied to the topic to any significant extent. The intersectional framework that I propose is constructivist; even though social categories are highly relevant in their specific contexts, they are subject to constant reconstruction and negotiation, and thereby inherently fluid. This stance enables identifying social categorizations as crucial for how people relate to climate change, comprehending how climate change may (re) construct social categorizations and power dynamics, and finding motivation for engagement and solidarity beyond identity politics. To illustrate how an intersectional perspective is useful in this regard, I present the example of Bolivia. Bolivia is an interesting case because of its recent political development, in which a left-wing assembly of indigenous movements and workers’ unions has reached government power, and because of the vivid debate on climate change within the country. The government has promoted a radical discourse in international climate negotiations, but in turn been criticized by their own supporters for not living up to their high moral standards domestically. In these debates, climate and environment issues have been framed mainly in relation to the categories of ethnicity and class, while for instance gender has until recently remained quite invisible. Climate change and environment debates have thus become a stage for construction and negotiation of social categories in Bolivia. In my article, I provide an analysis of this situation, based on an intersectional understanding.

Overview Carbon dioxide (CO2) has been in the news a lot. We have all heard about global climate change. Chances are your child in elementary school has also heard about it. It has been center stage in all local, national, and international political and environmental debates. I am not going to talk about it here. What I am going to articulate here is what we can do about it in our own way. By “we,” I mean we as individuals, we as SPE members, and we as oil and gas industry professionals. First, the bad news: Indeed, there are a lot of challenges with CO2. It is a stable compound and does not readily disintegrate. The biggest challenge perhaps is the cost of capturing CO2. Most of the anthropogenic CO2 is available from fixed sources such as power plants. The CO2 first has to be separated from nitrogen, then compressed, and finally piped and pumped into a subterranean reservoir for oil recovery or storage. All of these steps are expensive. Now the good news: It can be done. And we, as petroleum engineers and Earth scientists, are best suited to do it. We know our reservoirs, we have produced from them, and we can ensure that CO2 can be sent back safely and securely into them. Supercritical CO2 is an excellent solvent, especially for lighter crude oils. If it were free, or as low in cost as water, we would be injecting CO2 instead of water for its favorable properties. So how can we help? There are many areas and applications of CO2 in the oil and gas industry. CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is the bedrock and the mainstay in our application portfolio. A lot has been published in that area. At present, there remain several challenges with CO2 EOR. These include gravity override, poor sweep efficiency, and economic factors. Considerable work and research are ongoing to address all of these challenges. The papers that follow address some of them: an example of chemical-looping emerging technology in a bid to reduce CO2-capture costs; CO2 foams for improved oil recovery; commercial-scale demonstration projects; and use of CO2 in tight gas and unconventional resources. JPT Recommended additional reading at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org. SPE 169039 Development of Small- Molecule CO2 Thickeners for EOR and Fracturing by J.J. Lee, University of Pittsburgh, et al. SPE 169022 Experimental Investigation of Enhanced Recovery in Unconventional Liquid Reservoirs Using CO2: A Look Ahead to the Future of Unconventional EOR by Francisco D. Tovar, Texas A&M University, et al. SPE 171692 Carbon Capture and Storage for Enhanced Oil Recovery: Integration and Optimization of a Post-Combustion CO2-Capture Facility at a Power Plant in Abu Dhabi by A. Reichl, Siemens, et al.

The purpose of the article is to study global trends in climate change, which is one of the most pressing threats with a long-term negative impact on the population, environment and economy. The article analyzes the impact of global climate change on land resources, agriculture, forestry, water resources, emergencies, etc. It is defined that global climate change is one of the most acute problems of human development, ignoring which in the long run will lead to a leveling of economic growth. In addition, climate change can lead to various negative consequences, such as an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, worsening conditions for agricultural production, threatening changes in the regimes of water resources, high temperatures, air pollution, etc. The article examines the anthropogenic causes that have led to the global problem of climate change. The main causes and features of the global warming and climate change process are identified. The natural and anthropogenic factors that influence global warming and climate change are described. Examples of climate change in different regions of the world are given, and their consequences are characterized. The article presents a forecast of regional manifestations of global climate change, which is important for regional development and strategic planning. Forecasts help to develop adaptation strategies and measures to reduce the negative impacts and take advantage of opportunities that may arise as a result of changes. In addition, regional analysis makes it possible to determine the specifics of the impact of climate change on specific territories and take them into account in the development of strategies for balanced development, ensuring public safety and preserving natural resources. Approaches to determining the characteristics in the context of future climate change are proposed, as well as approaches to developing an adaptation policy in relation to possible consequences of climate change. The results of the study can be used by local government officials to assess the causes and consequences of global warming and extreme weather events, as well as to formulate adaptation policies.

In Thailand, the journalistic values of newsworthiness and timeliness tend to situate climate change issues, in both national and local news, within a global agenda. Episodic news and dependency on established sources, enhance the influence of powerful international and national institutions in climate change news discourses. This supports official government claims and environmental and natural resources management policies. Climate change issues are thus framed within global and national time but divorced from the local environmental problems of the present. This chapter adopts a political-economy of journalism viewpoint anchored by the concept of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), which indicates that timeliness and newsworthiness limit the voice of “the poor” in environmental debates. Related to this, powerful claims-makers employ Western environmental ideologies to secure climate change discourses in the news in ways that further an “ecological neo-imperialism” (Beck, 1999). Climate change mitigation is represented as a priority in Thai environmental policy with a focus on being good global citizens, while local climate change adaptations earn less attention from the news media. This chapter argues that capitalistic development discourse also shapes the structure of Thai news organizations. This, in turn, results in the neglect of more nuanced and localized environmental journalism in Thailand.

Ecological responses, adaptation and mechanisms of mangrove wetland ecosystem to global climate change and anthropogenic activities

Global climate change may add to the risk of infectious diseases faced by Canadians. A warmer climate may permit the northward expansion of certain disease reservoir animal hosts and vectors increasing the risk to Canadians from zoonotic diseases, i.e., diseases that are transmissible between animals and humans. A shorter, less severe winter would prolong the transmission season for many existing Canadian zoonoses, and could allow previously exotic zoonoses that enter Canada to become established. Significant challenges to epidemiological forecasting arise from complex interactions among climatic factors, zoonotic disease agents, other infectious agents, underlying human health and immunity, socio-economic factors, and ecological parameters. Public health officials and health care providers need to be kept informed of the changing nature of zoonotic disease risk in order to be vigilant in the early detection of disease, and to plan to respond to new or increased health risks. Surveillance and public education will also help protect Canadians from any additional zoonotic health risks of climate change. Global warming and climate change Global warming and associated climate change will be important determinants of future Canadian public health. 1 The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accepts projections of a 1.4 to 5.8oC increase in mean global temperature by 2100 as a result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapour) in the atmosphere. Achievement of Kyoto emissions reduction targets will reduce the rate of warming but will not prevent it. 2 Climate changes in Canada may include increased temperature over most of Canada, especially in winter and at night; reduced soil moisture and summer drought; increased frequency of extreme precipitation events; more severe weather; and an 11 to 77 cm sea-level rise, by 2100. 2 The greatest changes may affect the Arctic. 2,3